Last Ditch (18 page)

He waited for Alleyn to say something but Alleyn was silent.

‘You do understand, I’m sure. I mean it was nothing. No question of any – attachment. You might say, she simply happened to be damn good at one thing and made no bones about it. As was obvious to all. But – well, you’ll understand – I’d hate Carlotta to know. For it to come out. Under the circs.’

‘It won’t unless it’s relevant.’

‘Thank God for that. I don’t see how it possibly could be.’

‘Was this meeting at the cliffs the first time?’

‘I’m not sure – yes, I think it might have been.’

‘Not according to the note. The note said “Usual time”.’

‘All right, then. It wasn’t. I said I wasn’t sure.’

‘One would have thought,’ Alleyn said mildly, ‘you’d remember.’

‘Basically the whole thing meant so little. I’ve tried to explain. It was nothing. Absolutely casual. It would have petered out, as you might say, without leaving a trace.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘She was pregnant.’

‘If you’re trying to suggest – ‘ Louis broke off. He had spoken loudly, but now, after a quick look up at Ricky’s window, stopped short. In the silence that followed Julia’s voice could be heard. Alleyn looked round and was in time to see her appear briefly at the closed window. She waved to them and then turned away. Ricky could be dimly seen in the background.

‘There is absolutely no question of that,’ Louis said. ‘You can dismiss any such notion.’

‘Have you any theory on the parentage?’

For a moment or two he hesitated and then said that ‘not to put too fine a point on it’, it might be anybody. By one of those quirks of foresight Alleyn knew what his next remark would be and out it came. ‘She was quite a girl,’ Louis said.

‘So I’ve been told,’ said Alleyn.

Louis waited. ‘Is that all you wanted to see me about?’ he said at last.

‘Pretty well, I think. We’d just like to be sure about any possible callers at Leathers during the day. A tidying-up process. Routine.’

‘Yes, I see. I’m sorry if I didn’t take kindly to being grilled.’

‘It was hardly that, I hope.’

‘Well – you did trick me over that unlucky note, didn’t you?’

‘You should see us when we get really nasty,’ Alleyn said.

‘It’s just because of Carlotta. You do understand?’

‘I think so.’

‘I suppose I’m pretty hopeless,’ said Louis. ‘But still.’ He stretched elaborately as if freeing himself from the situation. ‘Ricky seems to be enjoying the giddy pleasures of life in Deep Cove and La Maison Ferrant,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine what he finds to do with himself when he’s not writing.’

‘There’s been some talk of night-fishing and assignations with his landlord in the early hours of the morning, but I don’t think anything’s come of it. Do you ever go in for that?’

Louis didn’t answer. It was as if for a split second he had become the victim of suspended animation, a ‘still’ introduced into a motion picture with the smile unerased on his face. This hitch in time was momentary: so brief that it might have been an illusion. The smile broadened and he said: ‘Me? Not my scene, I’m afraid. Too keen on my creature comforts.’

He took out his cigarette case and filled it with a steady hand from a new packet. ‘Is there anything else?’ he asked.

‘Not that I can think of,’ Alleyn said cheerfully. ‘I’m sorry I had to raise uncomfortable ghosts.’

‘Oh,’ Louis said, ‘I’ll survive. I wish I could have been more help.’ He looked up at Ricky’s window. ‘What’s all this we hear about him taking a plunge?’

Alleyn said it appeared that Ricky had slipped on the wet wharf, knocked his face against a gangway stanchion and fallen in.

‘He’s a pretty picture,’ he said, ‘and loath to display himself’

Louis said they’d soon see about that, and with a sudden and uncomfortable display of high spirits, threw a handful of fine gravel at the window. Some of it miscarried and spattered on the front door. Ricky loomed up, empurpled and unwilling, behind the glass. Louis gestured for him to open the window and when he had done so shouted: ‘ “But soft, what light from yonder window breaks” ’ in a stagy voice. Julia appeared beside Ricky and took his arm.

‘Do pipe down, Louis,’ she said. ‘You’re inflaming the populace.’

And indeed the populace, in the shape of one doubled-up ancient-of-days on his way to the Cod-and-Bottle and three pre-school-aged children, had paused to gape at Louis. Two windows were opened. Mr Mercer came out of his shop and went in again.

More dramatically, the front door of the Ferrants’ house was thrown wide and out stormed Mrs Ferrant, screaming as she came:
‘Louis: assez de bruit!
What are you doing!
Petit méchant.’

She came face to face with Louis Pharamond, stopped dead and shut her mouth like a trap.

‘Good morning, Marie,’ he said. ‘Were you looking for me?’

Her eyes narrowed and her hands clenched. For a moment Alleyn thought she was going to have a go at Louis, but she turned instead to him. ‘Pardon, M. Alleyn,’ she said. ‘A stupid mistake. My son occasionally has the bad manners to throw stones.’ And with a certain magnificence she returned indoors.

‘Let’s face it,’ said Louis, ‘I am
not,
in that department, a popular boy.’ He looked up at Julia in the window. ‘We’ll be late for luncheon,’ he called. ‘Coming?’

‘Go and find Bruno, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll be down in a moment.’

Alleyn looked at his watch. ‘I’m running shamefully late,’ he said. ‘Will you forgive me?’

‘For almost anything,’ Julia called, ‘except not coming to see us.
Au revoir.’

Ricky would not have chosen for Julia to see him with his black eye which was half-closed and made him look as if he lewdly winked at people. He had felt sheepish and uncomfortable when
she walked into his room, but, although she did laugh, it was sympathetically, and at first she didn’t ask him to elaborate on his accident. This surprised him because after all it would have been a natural thing to do. Perversely, although relieved, he felt slightly hurt at the avoidance.

Nor did she tease him with questions about his father’s activities, but related the Pharamonds’ London adventures, asked him about his writing and repeated her nonsense offer to help him with it. She dodged about from one topic to another. The children, she said, had become too awful. ‘They writhe and ogle and have suddenly turned just
so
common that I begin to think they must be changelings and not Jasper’s and mine at all.’

‘Oh, come,’ said Ricky.

‘I promise! Of course, I love them to distraction and put it all down to everybody but me spoiling them. We’ve decided that they shall have a tutor.’

‘Aren’t they rather small for that?’ Ricky ventured.

‘Not at all. He needn’t teach them anything: just rule them with a rod of iron and think of strenuous and exhausting games. I had rather wondered if Mr Jones might do.’

‘You can’t by any chance mean that?’

‘Not really. It did just cross my mind that perhaps he could teach them painting. Selina’s style is rather like his own. With guidance she might develop into a sort of Granddaughter Moses. Still, as you tell me he’s junketing in St Pierre-des-Roches, these ideas are only wishful thinking on my part. I merely throw them out.’

‘I don’t know where he is.’

‘Didn’t you go jaunting together in St Pierre?’

‘No, no,’ he said in a hurry. ‘Not together. Only, as it happened, at the same time. I was just a day-tripper.’

‘Well,’ said Julia, gazing at his face, ‘you certainly do seem to have tripped in a big way.’

Ricky joined painfully in her amusement. It was at this point that Julia had walked over to the window and waved to Alleyn and Louis.

‘They look portentous,’ she said, and then, with an air of understatement that was not quite successful, she said: ‘It’s not fair.’

‘I don’t understand? What isn’t?’

‘The two of them, down there. The “confrontation”. Isn’t that one of the
in
words? Oh, come off it, Ricky. You know what I mean. Diamond-cut-paste. One guess which is which.’

This was so utterly unlike anything Julia had ever said to him in their brief acquaintanceship and, in its content, so acutely embarrassing, that he could find no reply. She had come close to him and looked into his face searchingly as if hesitating on the edge of some further extravagance or indiscretion.

Ricky’s hands began to tingle and his heart to thump.

‘Poorest Ricky,’ she said, and gently laid her palm against his unbruised cheek, ‘I’ve muddled you. Never mind.’

Ricky’s thoughts were six-deep and simultaneous. He thought: ‘That’s torn it,’ and at the same time, ‘This is it: this is Julia in my arms and these are her ribs,’ and ‘If I kiss her I’ll probably hurt my face,’ and even,
bouleversé
though he was, ‘What
does
she mean about Louis?’ And then he was kissing her.

‘No, no,’ Julia was saying. ‘My dear boy, no. What
are
you up to! Ricky, please.’

Now they stood apart. She said: ‘Bless my soul, you
did
take me by surprise,’ and made a shocked face at him. ‘ “Out upon you, fie upon you, bold-faced jig,” ’ she quoted.

‘She’s not even disconcerted,’ he thought. ‘I might be Selina for all she feels about it.’

He said: ‘I’m sorry, but you do sort of trigger one off, you know.’

‘Do I? How lovely! It’s very gratifying to know one hasn’t lost the knack. I must tell Jasper, it’ll be good for him.’

‘How can you?’ Ricky said quietly.

‘My dear, I’m sorry. That was beastly of me. I won’t tell Jasper. I wouldn’t dream of it.’

She waited for a moment and then began to make conversation as if he were an awkward visitor who had, somehow or another, to be put at his ease. He did his best to respond and in some degree succeeded, but he was humiliated and confusedly resentful.

‘Have you,’ she said at last, ‘had your invitation to Cuth’s party?’

‘His party? No.’

‘Not exactly a party perhaps, although it’s “ladies a basket”, we must remember.
You
must remember. It’s one of his services. In the Barn at Leathers on Sunday. You’re sure to be asked. Do come and
bring your papa. Actually, it seems anyone is welcome. Gents fifty p. We’ve all been invited and I think we’re all going, although Louis may be away. It has “The Truth!” written by hand all over it with rows of exclamation marks and “Revelation!” in enormous capitals on the last page. You must come back to L’Esperance afterwards for supper in case the baskets are not very filling.’

It had been at this point that Louis threw gravel at the window. When Ricky looked down and saw him there with Alleyn standing behind him, it was as if they were suddenly exhibited as an illustration to Julia’s extraordinary observations. He was given, as he afterwards thought, a new look at his father – at his quietude and his air of authority. And there was handsome Louis in the foreground, all eyes and teeth, acting his boots off. Ricky understood what Julia had meant when she said it wasn’t fair.

In response to Louis’s gesture, he opened the window and was witness to the idiotic quotation from Romeo, Julia’s quelling of Louis and Mrs Ferrant’s eruption into the scene and departure from it.

When Julia had dealt crisply with the remaining situation, she shut the window and returned to Ricky.

‘High time the Pharamonds removed themselves,’ she said. She looked directly into his eyes, broke into her laugh, kissed him rapidly on his unbruised side and was gone.

She gave a cheerful greeting to Mrs Ferrant as she saw herself off.

Ricky stood stock-still in his room. He heard the car start up and climb the hill to the main road. When he looked out his father had gone and the little street was deserted.

‘And after all that,’ he thought, ‘I suppose I’m meant to get on with my book.’

Round the corner in Sergeant Plank’s office, Alleyn talked to his contact in Marseilles: M. l’Inspecteur Dupont. They spoke in French and were listened to with painful concentration by Mr Fox. Dupont had one of those Provençal voices that can be raised to a sort of metallic clatter guaranteed to extinguish any opposition. It penetrated every corner of the little room and caused Mr Fox extreme consternation.

At last, when Alleyn, after an exchange of compliments, hung up the receiver, Fox leant back in his chair, un-knitted his brow and sighed deeply.

‘It’s the pace,’ he said heavily. ‘That’s what gets you: that and the noise. I suppose,’ he added wistfully, turning to Sergeant Plank, ‘you had no difficulty?’

‘Me, Mr Fox? I don’t speak French. We only came here four years ago. We’ve tried to learn it, the missus and me, but we don’t seem to make much headway and in any case the lingo they use over here’s a patois. The chaps always seem to drop into it when I look in at the Cod-and-Bottle,’ said Plank in his simple way. Another symptom, Alleyn thought, of the country policeman’s loneliness.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘for what it’s worth, Ferrant has been spotted in La Tournière and in Marseilles.’

‘I got that all right,’ said Fox, cheering up a little.

‘And he’s made a trip to a place outside Marseilles where one of the big boys hangs out in splendour and is strongly suspected. They haven’t been able to pin anything on him. The old, old story.’

‘What are they doing about it?’

‘A lot. Well – quite a lot. No flies, by and large, on the narcotics squad in Marseilles: they get the practice if they look for it and could be very active. But, again, it’s the old story. The French are never madly enthusiastic about something they haven’t set up themselves. Nor, between you and me and the junkie, are they as vigilant at the ports as they might be. Still, Dupont’s one of their good numbers. He’s all right as long as you don’t step on his
amour propre.
He says they’ve got a dossier as fat as a bible on this character – a Corsican, he is, like most of them: a qualified chemist and a near millionaire with a château half-way between Marseilles and La Tournière and within easy distance of a highly sophisticated laboratory disguised as an innocent research set-up where this expert turns morphine into heroin.’